BELONGING-NESSAdam Blatner, M.D.

June 22, 2008

Belonging-ness is my term for the feeling of
belonging. We may say objectively, from the outside, that a person
belongs to this or that group, but that person may or may not feel that
connection. There are teenagers in families who feel alienated even
though their parents and teachers think they’re okay; the alienation is
an experience of non-belongingness. This feeling of belonging is a
basic need, so is is important to appreciate some of the psychological
and social dynamics involved. Based on a greater understanding, we may
be more able to diagnose problems that arise out of a lack of
belongingness and suggest more rationally formulated individual and
social actions for promoting or restoring a sense of belonging.

This problem is more relevant today because the postmodern condition
has intensified alienation. To say that our culture is postmodern is to
recognize more vividly that the changes in culture in the last several
decades has made life qualitatively different from fifty years ago (the
mid-20th century being the mid-late point of modernity). Alienation in
turn involves people not feeling sufficiently connected, and this
condition—i.e., the lack of belongingness—is one of the important yet
often overlooked causes of a variety of personal and social
dysfunctions.

Lack as a Source of Pathology

Pathology refers to the way things go wrong in living systems, and can
refer to mental and social problems as well as physical illnesses. We
get sick not only from toxins or infections coming from without, but
also sometimes from not being able to take in substances that the
body-mind needs. As an analogy, consider the problem of nutritional
deficits:

Around a hundred years ago the idea was just emerging that there were
certain nutrients that were needed but might not be present in some
diets. Diseases like pellagra
that you don’t hear about much anymore were unfortunately common among
poor people, in institutions, and in others with vitamin-deficient
diets. Because medical science in that era was still caught up in the
relatively recent recognition that there were germs, and, from that,
beginning to understand what was causing so many diseases, pellagra was
initially thought to be an infectious disease of some type. Efforts to
find the pellagra germ were not fruitful, though; rather, it was
necessary to break set, to look in a radically different direction,
“out of the box.” Could illness come not from eating something toxic,
but rather not eating something that was needed? Once it became
apparent that this, too, could be a source of pathology, other
nutritional deficiency diseases were also discovered.

Beyond nutrition, we have become aware that there are other types of
deficiency. People get sick from lack of exercise, stretching,
movement. Also, experts have increasingly noted that sleep deficit is a
common source of dysfunction affecting school, work, sex, and family
life. The aim of this paper is to heighten awareness of another type of
potential deficiency that has become more prevalent—the sense of
belonging. To appreciate this problem, several component ideas must
first be understood:

Belonging-ness as a Basic Need

Just as protein is needed in the diet for the health of the body,
so belongingness is a basic need for the mind and soul. In the early
years of the study of depth psychology, different
innovators explored our “basic” motivations. Freud suggested sex and
aggression as two key drives, Alfred Adler noted the seeking of the sense of
superiority to counter inferiority feelings, and Jung noted a wide
range of archetypal sources of motivation. Others also came up with
their suggestions.

By the 1940s, though, child development research had considered another
interesting disease that was prevalent again in orphanages, variously
called "hospitalism," "anaclitic depression", or “marasmus," and
describing the way some babies became sickly and often died! They
traced
this not to not being fed, but not being sufficiently cuddled, touched,
played with! Other researchers supported the growing need for
contact—and this in some ways was in contrast to a fashion in the
child-rearing texts of the 1920s and 1930s to not pick up the crying
child lest he be “spoiled.” (The success of the Doctor Spock books in
the late 1940s was due to his challenging this anti-spoiling regiment.
Benjamin Spock didn’t support “permissiveness” as his enemies accused,
but simply not being harshly reserved.)

Psychoanalysts in the 1950s wove such research into revisions of
theory, and while some stayed with Freud’s earlier “drive” theories, a
fair number came to espouse what came to be called object relations
theory. (This term refers to the object of a person’s love—and/or
hate—, but many think of objects as inanimate, so the term is somewhat
somewhat misleading; the theory itself seeks to highlight the intensity
and depth of interpersonal relations.)

Much of object relations theory originally was based on observations
about the interactions of infants and young children and their parents
or caretakers, but what should be realized as that these early bonding
experiences, with all their ups and downs, is only a small part of the
richness of the dynamic! By age four to six, young children expand the
scope of their worlds to include wider circles of friends, neighbors,
and more abstract entities. Kids hear about and begin to root for the
teams their parents root for, begin to relate to the family’s or
communities myths about gods or spiritual entities, partake of ethnic
identities, and feel patriotism and other sorts of loyalty. The term,
belongingness, then, is more understandable and inclusive of our
broader, more complex and life-long needs for feeling connected.

Active Belonging-ness

Belonging-ness differs from nutrition in that it is composed of active
as well as passive elements, involving what you give as well as what
you get. When you’re very little, it’s mainly a matter of feeling
included by your family, it’s passive. But around the age of four, you
become more aware that you can give, you can help, you can be useful to
those around you. When you make that kind of connection, you feel sort
of like they belong to you as much as you belong to them. You feed your
teddy bear and help setting the table. You’re a little bit of a
daddy-mommy as well as a little kid, because you can help. It’s
important for family to promote and validate this active component of
belonging because it gives the feeling a deeper kind of rooted-ness.

Some parents and school systems don’t arrange their operations so that
children can experience their usefulness. They’re not given enough
chores or responsibility—actually, it takes a bit of work to make such
arrangements, and sometimes it’s easier to just do things for the kids.
But this pampers or spoils them. It feeds into the part of
children that like to be babied, but if indulged, they fail to learn
the enjoyment of feeling useful that comes with the assumption of
responsibility.

The need to participate actively becomes even more important in
mid-childhood and beyond. Organizations and communities can be
inclusive, can think they’ve helped people to feel like they belong,
but unless those folks can find some way to participate and give of
themselves they don’t really buy into the feeling. To say again,
objective belonging (as observed from the outside) may not result in
people feeling belongingness (deep inside).

“Stroke” as a Unit of Belonging-ness

Since the dynamic of belongingness hasn’t been widely appreciated, some
of its component elements haven’t been widely understood. Nevertheless,
a few people have addressed the interpersonal sphere in some practical
ways. The term “stroke” was coined by Dr. Eric Berne, a psychiatrist
who in the 1960s developed the theory and method of Transactional
Analysis. He used it in his best-selling book, Games People Play. Berne
meant a stroke in the sense of the nonverbal equivalent of a pat on the
shoulder, and could consist of an appreciative glance, a gesture of
recognition, a kind or encouraging word. Strokes can be subtle, the
little and even unconscious signals exchanged among people that make
for the sense of community—murmurs of approval, nods, smiles, and the
like. Dan Goleman’s 2006 book, Social Intelligence, expresses a
heightened appreciation of this pervasive dynamic.

Another interesting term that overlaps with strokes is “attention,” as
in the phrase, “Oh, he just wants attention.” Observers of children’s
behavior, though, will note that if positive attention isn’t available,
children will provoke attention by behaving in a negative fashion.
Scolding is no fun, but it’s actually better than being ignored.

Berne and others in the field of Transactional Analysis note that
people need a certain unspecified number of strokes every day. When one
is getting enough strokes one feels belongingness. It’s more than ten
and probably less than ten-thousand. Let’s imagine for illustrative
purposes that people need, say, about 400 strokes a day. These can be
glances of recognition—the “hey, I know you” eyebrow flash—, smiles,
pats, shaking hands, rooting for your team on television, and so forth.
Note that strokes can be real or illusory or some mixture of both.

Of course, you tend to get and give strokes more easily by living in a
tribe where everyone knows you, and more if you play a useful role. On
the other hand, you can easily fall into a deficit by living in a big
city where folks tend not to look at you when you walk by. The various
traditional sources of feeling a sense of roots or
belonging-ness—neighborhood, family, job, and the like, to be discussed
further on, supplied strokes. In our postmodern era we have to learn to
find new creative sources of strokes just as we need to find new
sources of energy (substituting sun or wind or whatever for oil).

An Unconscious Dynamic

Because our culture doesn’t talk about this dynamic—in part because few
really understand it clearly—, most people don’t learn to realize
what’s going on inside them. Sure, words like loneliness, alienation,
isolation, existential “angst,” and other terms have been thrown
around, but most people feel shame and guilt about somehow being
inadequate or otherwise personally deficient for feeling this way. Or
they may feel resentment and yet don’t know whom to blame. This may
also be due to the fact that much of our psychology has been oriented
to the individual, implying that society as a whole is not to be
challenged. The assumption still operates that healthy people can
adjust and therefore that’s what we should try to do.

The feminist movement, though, arose as a challenge to this. A pressing
issue in the 1950s and 1960s was the plight of the housewife living in
a suburban “nuclear family” situation. It was a terribly isolated
existence and the prospect of another day with demanding children for
many women generated a net drain rather than surfeit of strokes. So
many women were complaining to their family physicians of symptoms
associated with anxiety and depression and were then given
tranquilizers (which had become a little safer than their more
dangerous earlier sedatives). But the real diagnosis was that they were
a little “stir crazy.” It wasn’t yet appreciated that trying to adjust
to an unhealthy situation may itself be unhealthy.

One of the reasons mother-in-the-home was more stable in the previous
century is that more people lived together—grandparents, siblings,
other families—or they lived close by. Women were far less isolated and
could get and give more strokes with peers.

In the 1970s, the social norms that generated guilt for considering
balancing home life and work were challenged. “The personal is
political.” Sometimes dis-ease lies not in the individual but in the
context, the rules of the society. Nowadays people no longer believe
that women should accept the traditional mother-in-the-home role.
Although some seem happy doing this, others nowadays are free to seek
more experiences beyond the home without guilt.

The point to note, though, is that the hunger for belongingness, for
human interchange, for feeling appreciated and the need for stroke
exchange was for the most part overlooked not only by professionals,
but was also not appreciated by clients and other people—the symptoms
were not uncommon, but a good diagnosis (in the sense of assessing the
state of basic belongingness) was rare.

An Aggregate Experience

Belonging-ness in a way is like good overall physical nutrition—it
doesn’t depend on any single source. There are many vitamins, minerals,
and different nutrients and they need to be balanced. In the world of
the mind, there are a number of phenomena that are similarly the
product of the overall sum of many inputs. Examples include the sense
of self, the sense of meaning, the sense of spiritual connectedness,
the sense of belonging-ness, among others. (See paper on aggregate experience elsewhere on my website.)

While a lack or problem in certain components may not throw the overall
“vital balance” off, when enough factors that deplete the sense of
belongingness begin to accumulate, the person begins to consciously or
unconsciously suffer. To restate, a variety of things can promote a
sense of belonging, and, similarly, many different activities can sap
belonging-ness. Thus, alienation, anomie, loneliness, isolation,
addictions, substance abuse, all may result from a net deficit of
belongingness experiences.

Interactions with Spirituality and Meaning

When people feel more belongingness, they tend to feel that their lives
and experiences are more meaningful. Disconnection from belonging works
in the opposite direction—folks feel their lives become less
meaningful, or even meaningless. This may also overlap with their sense
of self. Some people lose self-esteem, feel ashamed, guilty, and
reproach themselves, because they can’t understand why they’re so
lonely or isolated. They tend to feel as if they could just will
themselves into positive connectivity.

Alas, there’s a germ of truth to this: People can learn a variety of
ways to increase their capacity to make contacts and belong more, and
learning these techniques, skills, and practices should be encouraged.
However, equally important is the need for society and its sub-groups,
businesses, communities, schools, and the like also to take
responsibility for welcoming and fostering connections among newcomers
and those who don’t easily fit in.

More meaningful activities in turn tend to strengthen the feeling of
belonging-ness. One can enjoy the feeling by joining a club, but this
can be fairly superficial. On the other hand, when one begins to
actively help the club, invest energy, and feel needed by the club, one
begins to feel more identification with that club’s success or failure.

Spirituality is an interesting category: I define spirituality as the
activity of developing one’s connectedness or relationship with the
greater wholeness of being, whether that be imagined as a personal
supreme being, named or not, or as a less personal spirit or
super-force of nature. (You may be interested in other papers on spirituality on my website.) The myths, stories, personages, scriptures,
traditions, music, art, foods, and people all serve as psychological
anchors, symbols, that enhance the feeling of connection. Also,
spirituality generally draws to it a sense of ultimate significance,
deep meaning. So finding belongingness in one’s relationship to the
Divine Source also can be an important way to strengthen the process.

Religion I define as the social organization of the spiritual impulse,
and if people can further find a sense of belongingness with people who
share their own connection or path, the whole complex further deepens
and strengthens this dynamic in the psyche.

Belongingness Deficit

At the physical level, if certain vital nutrients are not available,
the body will extract them from whatever sources it can. These needs
will not be denied! For example, if the calcium intake from the diet is
insufficient, or, as in pregnancy, the body’s need is increased, the
calcium mineral salts will be dissolved out of the person’s own bones!
In the psychological realm, if there are insufficient emotional
connections with other people, the mind will turn to secondary systems
drawing on fantasy and illusion in order to maintain a sense of being
in relationship, of belonging.

As mentioned, it is quite possible to not know you have a nutritional
deficiency. In some poor communities, parents may be able to fatten
their babies up with calories without offering sufficient protein or
other nutrients. The kids seem healthy in some ways but get sick in
other ways. How could fat kids with big bellies be nutritionally
deprived? Well, part of the fat belly problem—you see this in some news
photos—is not fat at all, but rather a swollen liver. A liver that
doesn’t get enough protein gets fatty and huge in trying to compensate.

Similarly, people can fill their lives with stuff but still be
emotionally starved, and we hear about celebrities and others who crash
and burn because of a lack of authentic psychological involvements.
Unless we recognize the nature of the need to feel belongingness,
people will not know how best to really diagnose and correct the
problem of belongingness-deficit.

This deficit can be marginal, so that people can seem healthy enough to
keep going. They live, though, without much vigor, they have little
energy to give much more than what it takes just to stay alive, and
there’s little resilience to stress. People teetering on the edge of
belongingness deficit feel un-ease, stress, but have not yet progressed
to the point of fulfilling the criteria for a full dis-ease. Nor are
they conscious of what’s eating them (or, more correctly, what
psycho-social nutrients they’re not getting enough of). There may be
ten or a hundred of such folks with “sub-clinical”
belongingness-deficit for every one who is actually getting sick.

On the other hand, those who get and give a lot of strokes feel vital
and generous. They volunteer in the community, participate in
collective projects and political development, have lots of love to
give to family and others.

In nutrition, we hear about the problems of processed food, empty
calories, junk food, and how folks can become malnourished in spite of
modern living. (As an example, some computer workers in high tech
companies were sick and were found to have what had become quite rare
today: Scurvy! This is a vitamin C deficiency noted most commonly in
sailors in the 18th century! These nerds and geeks spent long hours
creating computer codes and relied on the vending machines in the break
room at work for their food. They didn’t go out enough to buy and eat
enough fresh fruits and vegetables. So “food” is in itself not
necessarily nutritious.)

There is junk food for the soul, too. One kind is the illusion of
connectedness associated with possessions. Buying, stealing,
manipulating, achieving, getting and then “having,” collecting,
accumulating—it can be not only things, but even celebrity, power or
status. It seems as if these will gratify and satisfy, and they do,
too, but only for a short burst. There’s a little high, a kind of
pseudo-belongingness, but then it fades. Drugs have this effect, too,
and getting drunk and party-ing. Then you feel empty again and need
another fix. As the sage in the Biblical book of Ecclesiastes says,
“All is vanity.”

Belongingness can be experienced in a number of ways. It can be more
symbolic, more actual, or a mixture of both. It can be more wholesome
and constructive, more destructive and anti-social, or more neutral. It
can involve all human endeavors.

For example, certain church youth groups promote not only togetherness,
but also service in the community. On the other hand, an occasional
church group produces campaigns to exclude others, parading with
posters saying “God Hates Homosexuals.” Another example: Kids get
together, sometimes playing innocent and wholesome games, and sometimes
veering off into mischief. Organizing the latter and you get the
growing epidemic of criminal gangs. Alas, these latter also thrive
because of the need of alienated kids to feel belongingness.

Some kinds of belongingness operate in fairly objective ways—you can
see people greeting each other and shaking hands or enjoying themselves
at a square dance. Other kinds of belongingness are more subjective:
Your heart swells with not only patriotism but also belongingness while
being in a crowd watching an Independence Day parade. You may root for
“your” team to win a sports contest. Hey, it isn’t your team! This is
you identifying with the team and its efforts—it’s in your head. Well,
it feels like your team—by rooting for it, it symbolically becomes
yours, and your rooting (even if they can’t hear you because you’re in
front of a television set) still works at a psychological level.

Note that there are mixtures. Church is social, but, as noted above, there is also a
belongingness felt with God (or Allah, or other names given for the
focus of devotion). The rooting for the team may be shared with other
people in the room, at a sports bar, and so forth—even if the players
themselves can’t hear you.

Some kinds of belongingness mix wholesome, pro-social activities with
either actual or symbolic relations; some kinds mix anti-social
activities also with actual or symbolic relations. Many types of
belongingness are more in-between, neutral, not particularly
constructive, but neither are they destructive—just relatively innocent
pastimes. Perhaps one could be criticized for not spending enough time
doing something more constructive, but there’s also some virtue in
relaxing. It’s a matter of balance.

Causes of Decreasing Belongingness

As times change, traditional sources of belonging can be lost or
diluted. We are in a postmodern era, an era that is characterized
especially by
an increasing rate of change in the world. As mentioned before, the
world is qualitatively different from what many middle aged and older
people grew up with. Consider these current trends:
– People are able to move more easily, go away to college,
travel internationally in the armed services, peace corps, or business,
move among different jobs as part of career building.
– Women also enter college and the work force more, and thus they, too, move more.
– Grandparents move to retirement homes away from the neighborhood.
– People’s old neighborhoods change radically. (The poet
Gertrude Stein shook her head about her childhood home in Oakland,
California, saying with a sigh, “There’s no ‘there’ there anymore.”
– People more frequently meet and marry different kinds of
people, and this leads to both some blurring and some clashing of
religions, races, ethnicities, sub-cultures, classes, music, foods, and
so forth.
– New kinds of jobs and careers are emerging that didn’t even
exist a generation ago, and we may expect that this trend will continue
and that our children will be doing types of work that we cannot even
conceive of today.
– The future is less bright as we are all faced with challenges
of unintended consequences of pollution, species loss, resource
exhaustion, overpopulation, ecological degradation, global warming, and
so forth.
– Our world is disrupted by those who challenge traditional
social role definitions. We are led to doubt what should be our
culture’s appropriate expectations about gender, sexuality, religion,
authority, education, and other categories.
– We are challenged also to cope with the advantages and
disadvantages of the exponential growth of the internet, other kinds of
communications, and distributed (virtual) social networks nationally
and internationally via the internet and its “social media” forms of
YouTube, FaceBook, Second Life, multi-user video games, ubiquitous
cellphone text-messaging, and so forth.

As a result of all these shifts, the major traditional sources of the sense of belonging have been significantly weakened:
– roots in one’s neighborhood
– roots with one’s extended family
– roots with clubs, schoolmates, friends at church, community events
– roots in affiliation with an ethnic group, special sub-culture, music, food, rituals, history
– roots in knowing what one wanted to be, to become, expected vocation, social role
– roots in a positive future, a feeling that things were going to be better for everyone

It will do no good to decry these changes. It has become apparent that
technological evolution can be perhaps slightly guided but hardly
countered. It is possible, though, recognizing the nature of the need
for belonging, to restore a great deal of this by creatively generating
activities that promote that experience.

Correcting the Imbalance

If we recognize the underlying need for belongingness as a profound
force in life, we may more intelligently respond in many ways. I am
open to your suggestions, but to warm us up, here are some possible
approaches:

1. School curricula must keep kids grounded in a positive social
network. It’s not enough to support “self” esteem—that feeds
significantly on the overall morale of the group. If there’s too much
competitiveness, even the winners end up feeling left out even as they
get that brief flash of achievement. Remember the need for balance.

2. There need to be many more social experiences, clubs, after-school
activities, opportunities for kids to feel belongingness. There has
been an insane over-valuing of individual academic achievement. While I
don’t discount academics, they just don’t take root in the mind and
soul of a kid who is in a marginal or gross deficit of strokes. Kids
with good grades are getting depressed and we need a better way to
diagnose what this is about! Even if there are “chemical
imbalances,” we need to ask why: Animals who lose status also
have hormonal changes.

3. The theme, “the world needs you” needs to be emphasized as a general
motto especially to kids, but really all ages need to hear it. We need
to elaborate on this theme, develop it. It focuses on the ways anybody
can find a niche.

4. We need to give more priority to not just vocational guidance, but
also avocational guidance. I envision several classes a year during the
middle school period being devoted to identifying special areas of
talent and interest. Most people don’t appreciate what they’re really
good at, and what they do naturally fairly well. A corollary, of
course, is that folks tend to enjoy doing what they do most easily.

5. Difference, weirdness, oddness—it seems as if most people are odd in
certain ways. We need to celebrate this by re-framing it as a virtue,
as a part of individuality, as a possible channel for one’s special
function in the world.

This also fits with an interesting paradox: People feel more
belongingness when they can feel that their differences are enjoyed or
at least tolerated. This reflects another need to discover and follow
individual differences even in the face of their having little to do
with the benefit of the family or group. (In psychoanalysis this
dynamic is known as “separation-individuation” and emerges especially
between the ages of two to four.)

6. I mentioned that it isn’t always easy for parents to structure their
lives so their kids have chores that are genuinely useful. This is true
for schools and organizations. Attention needs to be given to
reinforcing young people when they’re giving of themselves. There needs
to be that inter-personal reward—not so much “that’s good”—approval can
be misleading—but more a thoughtful expression of how what was done was
useful, how it was effective or helpful in some way.

7. Encouragement is an art, a skill. Great hosts and hostesses know
this intuitively. Good teachers or youth group leaders also. It’s more
than mere flattery, it’s a capacity to identify some positive behavior
and draw it forward. Alfred Adler, the founder of the school of
Individual Psychology around the 1920s was asked near the end of his
life (in the mid-1930s) to sum up his insights. He rose to the occasion
by saying, “Encourage the child.” For him this was a profound
principle, a skill of nurturing of the aforementioned active aspect of
belonging-ness. (A plug should be given here to the Montessori
schools and the wisdom of their approach, which also fits with this
appreciation of belonging.)

8. For adults, the equivalent of encouragement might be found in the
realm of motivational enhancement, common in the world of sales people,
positive thinkers, and the like. Some of new age thought is drawing on
this trend, as seen in the popularity of the book and video, “The
Secret.” It speaks to the resonant chord of awareness that daring to
imagine the best not only in others, but in oneself and one’s
aspirations—daring to and practicing expecting the best out of life.
(The more you have positive expectations, the more you are alert to
opportunities as they arise, as a basic starting point.) They would say
that there are self-fulfilling prophecies, and expecting the best tends
to draw forth the best. All these can be intensified by adding the
dimension of interpersonal and group support, encouragement, and
belonging.

9. Our country needs a general uplift. For years we have extended our
collective energy in seeking to help distant peoples in Iraq and
Afghanistan fight against various tribal and ideologic causes,
diverting incredible amounts of money that could have been spent
supporting the building of bridges, roads, education, research, and
other parts of our infrastructure. “W’s” father, George H. W. Bush,
back in 1989 at his inaugural address, spoke of the need for
encouraging community endeavors, the “thousand points of light.” He was
right about this, even though his administration diverted its energies
into the first Iraq war, so the ideals were then neglected.

Raising morale generates belongingness which then motivates more people
to give a little more and this can perhaps begin to turn around the
inertia, selfishness, apathy, and other qualities that reflect more
non-belongingness. It may not be easy to do in a time of recession, but
if Obama gets in, there just may be enough excitement among youth and
by contagion many other parts of society, it could happen. (There’s no
question that if McCain is elected we’ll spin into even more cultural
demoralization while a few wealthy people continue to suck money off
the top.)

Summary

I predict that in the future people will look back in some wonder
at the contrasts of our present culture, perhaps in the way we are
inclined to feel as we consider the contrast between the grandeur of
the great castles and fancy balls of the aristocracy
of Europe in the 17th through 19th centuries and the squalor of the
hygiene of that era. I think the future will note a corresponding
disparity between wealth and luxury in many sectors and the poor
"social hygiene" leading to widespread alienation and a variety of
social dysfunctions in our own time. We need to bring our social
technologies up so that they can modulate the excesses of hard
technologies, or our world will seem more like a kindergarten in which
the children have obtained real guns and ammunition. I hope this paper
and related efforts will contribute to this endeavor. Please feel free
to email me at adam@blatner.com with suggestions about how I can revise or improve this paper.